Chapter 21: His Father's Room

The forty-second floor had a different carpet.

It was thicker and darker, and it ran to a single door at the end of a corridor with no windows.

Elliot stopped in front of the door.

He had a key in his hand, a small brass one on a ring with nothing else.

"Nobody has been in here since March," he said. "Not the cleaners. Not my mother. I pay the building to leave it."

"Four years."

"Four years in March."

He didn't move.

I put my hand flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, and felt him breathing.

"I can do it alone," he said.

"I know you can."

"I would rather you were here."

"Then I'm here," I said.

He turned the key.

The air inside was cold and still and smelled of paper and leather.

The blinds were down.

Elliot found the switch, and one lamp came on, a green banker's lamp on a very large desk.

It was a very ordinary room.

A bookcase of bound reports. A leather sofa. A rug with a worn path to the window.

On the desk sat a blotter, a pen set, a framed photograph turned toward the chair, and a black telephone with a long cord.

The handset was lying on its side next to the cradle.

It had been lying there for four years.

"They left it," Elliot said. "The men who came. I told them not to touch it. I thought... I don't know what I thought."

His voice was quite steady, which frightened me.

"He was holding it," he said. "When they found him. It was in his hand."

I stood beside him and said nothing.

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